Many telecommunications devices include backplanes for transmitting digital information between components of the devices. For example, a telecommunications switching system might include a backplane for transmitting digital data representing voice signals between cards associated with incoming and outgoing ports. A switching system would also include a switching mechanism to associate incoming data received at an incoming port with an appropriate outgoing port and to route the incoming data to the outgoing port. Within a time-division multiplexing (TDM) switching system, this switching mechanism must receive the incoming data for each time slot, determine the outgoing port for the data for each time slot, and route the data for each time slot to the appropriate outgoing port. Since each time slot may be associated with a corresponding call between persons, computers, or other entities, successful operation of the system in many instances depends on the ability of the switching mechanism to accomplish these goals with tremendous accuracy and speed while meeting the capacity requirements placed on the system.
As the telecommunications industry continues to dominate the growth of the global economy, meeting the accuracy, speed, and capacity requirements placed on a switching system, while reducing to the extent practicable the footprint, manufacturing cost, and power consumption of the switching mechanism itself, becomes increasingly important. However, prior switching mechanisms and techniques are often inadequate to satisfy these needs, at least partially because of the many hardware components and associated circuitry typically required for their implementation. Since each additional component associated with a switching mechanism in general adds to its footprint, manufacturing cost, and power consumption, previous techniques involving relatively large number of such components become less desirable as switching systems become smaller and port density increases. Previous switching mechanisms and techniques do not adequately integrate the functionalities associated with TDM switching and do not fully realize the many technical advancements associated with design and fabrication of application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC). These and other deficiencies become particularly apparent when previous mechanisms and techniques are incorporated into high availability backplane environments of modern TDM switching systems.